In a new post to PHPMaster.com today, Rakhitha Nimeshtakes a look at Faker, a tool that can be used to generate random test case data as a part of your workflow.

Testing is an iterative part of the development process that we carry out to ensure the quality of our code. A large portion of this entails writing test cases and testing each unit of our application using random test data. Actual data for our application comes in when we release it to production, but during the development process we need fake data similar to real data for testing purposes. The popular open source library Faker provides us with the ability to generate different data suitable for a wide range of scenarios.

Faker uses built-in data providers like "Person", "Company", "DateTime" and "UserAgent" to give you randomized output from the data sets you define. Code is included showing how to create the provider in your objects, extending the correct provider and making a request for a property. A real-world example is also included about testing an email marketing engine for address, title, name and content. There's also a little bit added at the end showing how you can increase the randomness of the results returned by "seeding" the Faker engine.